The Weasel book does not cover one of the outcomes of the use of GM foods. Today will be a bit of a tangent, looking at one of the biggest challenges coming from GM foods: superweeds. GMO’s giving rise to superweeds More problems with IP and superweeds The GMO/superweed arms race

Vandana Shiva: Golden Rice: When the first successful prototype of Golden Rice had finally yielded its elusive yellow kernel, the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned an audit of intellectual property rights that had been used in its making. The result was shocking. Thirty-two companies owned seventy different intellectual and technical property rights, otherwise known as patents, on […]

Diamond v. Chakrabarty In 1972, Chakrabarty developed a strain of bacteria that could degrade oil; his patent was rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office since ‘living organisms are not patentable.’ In 1980, the Supreme Court decided that a patent may be obtained on ‘anything under the sun that is made by man.’ This […]

How we talk about things betrays our assumptions, ideological perspectives, and social categorization of particular objects or practices. This is why we look at discourse. All discourse really means is how we talk about things – but when we talk about discourse, we talk about the wider public sphere of media, texts, and even conversations. […]

The next couple of readings focus on the impact of information technology on society. Computers and artificial intelligence are another “hybrid” where science, religion, and society intersect. In fact, the development of computers and information technology overall has long been an interdisciplinary issue, beyond the specific natural science disciplines as we discussed earlier in terms […]